Alice Grown Up
by merlintriss
Summary: In the years after Alice visited Wonderland, she has grown up and told her children the same stories she used to create. I have yet to read Through the Looking Glass, so I'm not sure if its compliant.


A/N: This is a piece I wrote for my ENG class about what happens to Alice after her adventures in Wonderland. It's based off the Disney movie a little bit (some of my information comes from childhood viewings) but primarily based on the Lewis Carroll book and biographical information. The quote is from the end of the first book. I hope you enjoy it.

_Later, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and who she would gather THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland long ago…_

Alice had never really lost her hair, those long flowing locks that seemed to cascade down her back, though her eyes were no longer the bright blue they had been as a child. Her sisters' hair had not retained its subtle sheen, and was instead a flat gray, and when they would sit together on the porch a stranger passing by could easily tell which of the sisters was the younger. Her eyes were clouded now, and she couldn't always see what was in front of her, though Alice still smiled when she thought her grandchildren were approaching her, a witty barb on her tongue if it was her sister on her way.

It had been many years since she had been a child, or could even pass for a maiden, since she had dreamed of going down the rabbit hole, since she had ignored her lessons, or since Dinah had been alive, though she'd had a great many cats since then. Dogs too, little terrier dogs that hunted down rats, though she felt a little sorry every time she saw some form of dead rodent, and she would sometimes whisper, when she was sure no one was listening, "Sorry, dear sir, I never meant to offend."

Her sister had gone off to a women's college in America, so her parents sent Alice to finishing school since her sister couldn't act as a governess. She liked it well enough there, and in the dormitories she would dream about the fantastical world of Wonderland and would tell the other girls, their knees pulled up to their necks, curled around her in wonder, about the Queen of Hearts, editing the scene so that she seemed more clever than she'd dreamed. After hours, when the headmistress with her mean ruler and her strict sense of propriety, had long gone to bed, Alice would become the Queen and there would be a raucous game of croquet, throwing themselves around the room like little girls do.

She had met a young man when she was just out of finishing school, named Charles. He was a fantastic poet, who had a real talent with words and who was supported by a rich uncle. Charles was not quite what her parents expected, until they found out that he was from a good family and that his patron was wealthy.

She liked to go out to the park, where the wind was fresh and her mind was clear. She would meet Charles there and talk about the pigeons and the wildlife. He liked to say she had a keen mind, a writers mind, and that she picked up on things the other girls didn't. Alice loved the way he smiled at her, like she was precious and tender. And when he would reach out and touch her hand when they sat on the park bench, her heart would soar.

"Alice." He told her one day.

"Yes?"

"I think I'm madly in love with you."

"Only madly? I've never been rather fond of mad." But she smiled at him just the same, "But with you I think that's ok." They were married shortly thereafter when spring was new and fresh and her mother put fresh flowers in her hair. She couldn't get the image of the Cheshire cat out of her head, the little voice that said "you are mad, and I am mad, we are all mad." For a couple of nights afterward, she dreamed of the table with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, running around just trying to get a cup of tea and finding that all the cups were empty. But Charles and her weren't mad. They were fantastically in love, and she left it at that.

They had kept to themselves in a small English country town and when it came to the country, it seemed to her that it was all the same country. Rolling hills and sheep. But she liked the hills, where the flowers didn't talk and where kings and queens were men of flesh and bone and not of cardboard.

She was pregnant a year after marrying Charles, her belly round and full with her love for him. He loved her, more than he seemed to love anything else. That made her happy, because she loved him too, loved when he pushed her down on the bed and played with her long blonde hair and when she would wrap his arms around her waist and cradle that slowly expanding life within.

When she was almost due, her sister came to live with them for awhile, setting up a small bed in her sewing room. It was nice having her around again, and Charles would joke that it looked like they were attached at the head; they would sit so close and whisper to each other. Even though there was a great difference in their age, they had grown closer after school and whenever she could she would visit. Her own husband was a military man and away from home far too often.

Not long after Wonderland Alice had realized that she didn't know that much at all. There were other girls much brighter than she at the finishing school, little know-it-alls that knew only as much as had been put in front of them. She wasn't like them. She had read somewhere that when a person realized they knew nothing that was when they started being wise, and she liked the way it sounded. But that was for the men in long white robes that populated the books of philosophy Charles read. She no longer considered herself clever, not since she had been a child wondering why her sisters' book never had any pictures.

Charles always wanted to travel, but there was never any money in it, so some nights when they would be lying on their little bed, in the cottage at the end of his uncle's land, she would tell him about Wonderland, or any other number of lands, about the little bits she had read in almanacs about the other side of the world, about Fiji and shrunken heads and volcanoes that turned the sky black. She would put him to sleep with her stories. They couldn't leave the countryside, but she would take them places, and hope that one day his poetry would be popular and they could live in a house that was all their own.

They had three children, and Alice only lost one to whooping cough. He was a little thing, and he took to fever fast and they had to bury him under the tree in the cemetery, next to her mother and her stillborn sister. She loved them all so dearly, and every third Saturday of the month she would make her own little pilgrimage to visit the boy she had given to the hands of God. _For our little boy Leo._

Alice's hair started to get a little gray, the only real change to it, strands of silver flowing in between the blonde locks that she had been known for. Charles got a little fatter, the respectable pot belly of a man his age, who had given up on poetry and taught Latin to a couple of boys from town for decent pay. He had whiskers, bright steel gray that showed rather clearly from the tan of his face.

At night, when she was putting her two children to bed, Lorina and Thomas, she would tell them about how she used to be a pirate queen, that she had once beaten the Queen of Hearts at croquet, about the magical lands that waited just beyond the edge of England, just for little boys and girls. But most of all that everything was within their grasp.

"He was a queer looking rabbit, no like any you've seen before...do you know why Lorina?" Lorina had no front teeth, and a crooked smile besides, but bright eyes that paid attention to every moment.

"No." Both children were in their beds, though they were both upright as Alice told her tale, standing between them and performing like a circus ringleader.

"Because he was wearing a waistcoat like Brother Jeremy wears"

"That's just silly. Rabbits don't wear waistcoats." Thomas had the surety of an eight-year-old, chest puffed out like he had just figured out the trick, though he too waited with baited breath when she started telling her stories about Wonderland.

"Exactly. Rabbits don't wear waistcoats, but this one did. And he pulled this great big pocket watch out of his front pocket, big as your fist, and he just shouted, 'oh goodness, gracious me, I'm late." And until their little eyes drooped and the moon became big in their window, Charles would tell them about Wonderland.

"You're really quite good with the children," her sister told her when she came to visit. She had never had any children of her own, and though her husband was no retired, they never spent much time together. Instead she visited Alice.

"Thank you. I just try to think about how you used to humor me as a child."

"Humor you? I loved your stories. And how they would get so fantastic? What, with growing to the size of a tree or shrinking so much that you started to swim in your own tears? It was great to hear about the places you went to in your dreams."

Lorina loved her aunt best of all, and would come out and sit on her lap until she got to be too big, and then she lost interest in adults beyond wanting to be one. Children, Alice had found, reached a certain age where they wanted nothing more than to be considered mature, and thought that adults were getting in the way of that.

Thomas went to art school with the money his great uncle had willed to him, leaving Alice alone with Lorina for a little while until she too left. He would send her postcards from France with little figures drawn on the back, beautiful women in the Sorbonne, walking down the Champs.

Charles died a little while after Lorina moved on, and she woke to find him curled up next to her, cold to the touch. Her sister came to live with her in the little cottage, her own husband dead for a couple of years. Two old widows living together with fading eyes and children with grown pursuits.

Thomas started drawing picture books about his mother's stories, though they weren't quite what she had imagined and she wasn't the star of his fantasies. She was ok with that. Boys had to make their own way in the world and she loved reading his books when he sent them home. They were vivid illustrations of a world she had helped created and that he had finished, rounding off the edges and making it a little universe for his imagination.

Lorina got married and was raising her own children, which she brought every third Saturday so they could hear their grandmothers' stories and be wrapped in the love that abounds in the realm of fiction. She would sit off to the side, knitting, while her mother told her children the same stories and they listened with the same wild eyed abandon.

It was Christmas now, and the children came to visit more. She could hear them at the door and called for them to come in. Little Leo came in and sat on the floor near her rocking chair. He always wanted to hear about the Cheshire cat, and this time Dinah came and sat in his lap and he was ready to go on adventures with her. She tried to tell him the story, about how the it was the cat who had gotten her into the mess at all, but she was so tired, and she told him that in a little bit, she would talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum, but that right now she felt like resting in the sun. Her eyes closed, but right before she looked outside, and saw a little white rabbit run into the forest. A little white rabbit in a waist coat.


End file.
